Welcoming the Earlies

If you love a particular kind of flower, you often wish that its season would last longer so that you can enjoy it all summer. Daylilies are most often a July flower, and so we fans wait patiently through the parade of the beautiful spring and early summer blossoms, the tulips and peonies and irises and all the others, keeping track of the progress of our scapes and buds.

More and more hybridizers are focusing on season extension, both on the front and back ends; some nurseries specialize in these types of cultivars. We’ve been trying to acquire more of these Earlies and Lates, ultimately hoping for a June-to-September daylily garden.

This year, an unexpected delight: two of our first 2010 seedlings opened as Earlies, one of them the first post-Stella daylily and a red-purple one to boot. Most early daylilies seem to be in the yellow-orange range, so this was doubly pleasing. To add to our pleasure, both of these seedlings are keepers: nice form, good increase, branching and bud counts (especially for first-year seedlings), and opened very well. Neither of them breaks new ground in the daylily world in terms of color and pattern, but that’s fine; we’re just trying to grow new hardy daylilies with beautiful faces that will thrive in Northern gardens.

The first one pictured, red-violet, is a cross between Intelligent Design and Sailing at Dawn; the second, buttery gold with the cranberry eye, is the offspring of Hold Your Horses and Brown Lasso. After they’re done blooming, they’ll be moved out of the seedling bed and into a “keeper” bed, where they’ll be evaluated for another year, to see how they handle being moved and how well they continue to increase. Then, if all goes well, they’ll be available the following spring. It’s a long process, one that forces me to be patient. But the rewards of seeing these beautiful new blossoms for the first time makes it all worthwhile!